This application relates to methods and systems for facilitating resupply orders for inventory items, including household consumable commodities and business inventory.
Currently, the most common methods of reordering fall into one of five general categories, each having limitations and drawbacks. The first category is scheduling periodic refill or reship orders based on a predicted usage. The notable drawback with this method is that reordering is based off a predicted usage, which monitors usage over an unacceptably long usage period such as month-to-month intervals. Such methods frequently cannot account for shorter periods so a user cannot depend on this method to overcome a “non-monthly need” to reorder. For example, consider needing to reorder a 12-can pack of soda. If, for example, a user consumes one can a day, reordering on a monthly interval is unsuitable because the number of days in a month is not divisible by the number of cans in a pack.
The second category is measuring consumption through an embedded device, such as an ink monitor in a printer, copier, or fax machine. This method faces the major drawbacks of failing to account for actual inventory in storage and the possibility of, or consumption of ink by multiple devices.
The third category is retail and shelf inventory monitoring software that uses purchase orders to track consumption. This method faces the drawback that usage calculations depend on software to monitor usage, depletion, and reordering of the inventory items, which may be error prone. Because of the potentially large amount of varying inventory (SKUs, part numbers, etc.), businesses typically close for a period of time to visually and physically check their inventory against their software counts.
The fourth category is sensors embedded in product packaging or an enclosure for storing an item. A drawback of this method is that it depends on the product manufacturer, retailer, or enclosure maker, to incorporate a device into the packaging, product, shipping container, or the like prior to sale. Another drawback is that the critical threshold point of when to reorder is not determined by the user. Another drawback is that the reorder thresholds are preset, and cannot be defined by the user.
The fifth category is devices having a button that is manually pressed to reorder a product. The manual nature of the reorder method is its major drawback because it requires manual user input. In addition to being less convenient than automatic reordering devices, manual systems, are also prone to accidental reordering. For example, the button may be pressed more times than is intended, or it may be pressed unintentionally by a person or accidentally by another object.
The present disclosure provides substantial improvements over current technologies as is further described herein.